This chapter presents a theory of creativity as a transformative process, derived from the study of a group of modernist writers used as case studies. Such transformation has analogues in the neuroscientific study of creativity, which deals with dynamic interactions between nonconscious and conscious processing. Certain literary authors illuminate the extent to which the creative process is conscious and top-down yet also nonconscious and bottom-up according to different states of the brain at different stages of the creative process. The prefix “trans” describes the brain’s interconnectivity that is exemplified in the transforming strategies that contribute to the artistry of these authors. Writers like Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Anaïs Nin transform their life material into the art of their fiction through a variety of literary devices that can be scrutinized. The autobiographical material derives from various preliminary modes of creativity—the default mode network (DMN) in Nin, the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep mode among the Surrealists, encoded emotional memories in the case of Woolf and Nin, and fragments of quotidian life in the case of Henry James, Joyce, and Faulkner. These writers were cognizant of their creative processes, writing about them in notes, letters, diaries, memoirs, and prefaces and enacting them in their creative works.